...to Keep My Head Above Water and Maybe Figure Some Stuff Out.
I'm playing out lines of thinking, not positing truths. Let's play.

Tender

Monday, July 3, 2017

A Pragmatist's Support for Basic Income in Canada

No bleeding heart!

I'm no bleeding heart. I cultivate compassion, so people might mistake me for a softy, but my heart is highly pragmatic in nature. I don't want to give people something for nothing, I don't support policies that discourage active participation in the social and economic systems. I believe that the right of life in a human body means we owe our best to making the situation here as good as it can be, across the board. I believe that another person's reality is of equal value to mine, even if I can't understand or even fully accept it. My goal is simple: peaceful coexistence on Earth. (Impossible! the conditioned minds shout, and I think yes, because people say so, the grandest simplification of essential truth.)

It's all about peaceful co-existence

When I say that a Basic Income is the way to go, I am not trying to give people something for nothing, and I am not advocating for something likely to make people lazy and stupid. On the contrary, I am advocating for policy that encourages and supports everyone to actively participate in the social and economic systems for the good of all our peaceful co-existence, which includes the good of the market economy. That's what I'm trying to achieve.

I've looked at other measures - for example, Minimum Wage increases, and Living Wages. In both cases, the assumption is that every adult human is physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually capable of working for 40 hours a week, free to do so, and that someone wants to pay them for what they can do. Clearly this assumption does not reflect the lived experience of possibly a majority of Canadians, but certainly a huge representation of people across cultures and backgrounds. People who have dependents, disabled relatives, elderly parents, young children, babies - basically, people living the common and expected life cycle of all people in our society - often cannot rely on themselves to work full time. People get sick, they say a third of us will get cancer - people can't work all the time. We also know that employers shed jobs as quickly as automation becomes cheaper than humans, so even if we don't implement any Living or Minimum wage, jobs will disappear and not be replaced at the mid and lower educational tiers.

Living wage is fair but won't tackle poverty

I still believe a Living Wage as the Minimum Wage represents the actual cost of the resources (human time and effort) and should therefore be set according to the cost for a life that includes meaningful participation in society, in a fair market economy. In that way, the profiteers pay what it costs to maintain their resource, and keep people from otherwise draining the social pools. But, a Living Wage will not tackle poverty. It will just make it feel a little less bad for some people.

The current systems are inefficient and expensive

What about the current system of Disability, Ontario Works (in Ontario) and Employment Insurance? Just thinking about those three sets of bureaucracies makes the Capitalist in me seethe. All to control the behaviour of people who, left to their own devices in a job-shedding economy, would likely contribute more by staying home and taking care of their loved ones and neighbourhoods than by working for some employer and having their government handouts clawed back, or stressing about it. We shame people who are actively looking for jobs and haven't managed to convince anyone to pay them for what they're good at. It's wasteful, counter-productive and stupidly expensive. I won't even talk about the current state as a viable option.

A Basic Income deletes all that. The health benefits, supports and training aspects remain in place, but all the wasteful tracking, determining validity, checking-up and forcing behaviour, all that just disappears. It's been shown time and again that when people have a steady floor of income, they are more willing to try for bigger things, take a risk with innovation, contribute their time as a volunteer, and commit to longer-term projects. Their outlook improves, they become more hopeful and more pleasant, and less likely to cut me off in traffic. When we tear up the floor behind them, they can't be sure of their footing.

A safe place to live, clean water and sanitation, health care, nutritious food and clean air - these are our most basic human needs, and we can choose to make sure that all this resource-transformation-for-profit provides this minimum for all Canadians. I'm still working on getting the numbers (and interesting economists in gathering and crunching them), but my working theory is that it would actually be cheaper to give every adult Canadian $1500 a month than to pay for the punitive, inefficient systems we have.

Not on my dime!

But what about the people who don't need it? At the top tax brackets it's basically taxed back. But on a month-to-month basis, it helps every citizen with cash flow, which helps all that cash flow right through to spending that isn't based on debt.

What about the freeloaders? Based on what we've seen in experiments so far, most people will spend their Basic Income on food and entertainment, fixing cars and housing essentials (like roofs, energy efficient upgrades, etc.), education/training for themselves and their kids, and saving. So, local spending that spurs the economy and improves our neighbourhoods and people's employability. All things we want to encourage.

We also know that hardly anyone will stop working altogether, and the ones who do will be the teens, so they can focus on school, and the moms and others responsible for the care of our most precious and our most vulnerable citizens. Caregivers are, by the way, already working largely for free and in no way compensated for their time or the opportunity costs of not being able to work full time. All of society is built on the free labour of care.

And what about those lazy bums drinking beer and playing nintendo all day? What about them? There aren't many, really, and at least they're not doing crime, or getting angry and disruptive. Let them be lazy. In my experience and studies, I find that most people who are not dealing with significant mental health issues will try to better their position, whatever it is, through some form of effort. If they don't, they either need help or to be left alone. They aren't that expensive, in the grand scheme. We may not like if someone is "getting by on my dime" but it's better than the alternative.

Shareholder Dividends

Anyway, governments are our resource stewards. They are supposed to protect as much of our resources as we need to live well, and make sure what they sell and lease pays enough returns to maintain a society where the minimums are met and people have the ability to live in peaceful coexistence. That's their job. The Basic Income is simply shareholder dividends on our shared resources. Good resource stewards would be seeing to the minimums by curtailing the maximums. We need to ask for that.

The Basic Income is the most efficient, the most respectful and the most honest way of accounting for the value of our social good that I've found yet.

I support a Basic Income from my socially minded, fiscally careful, compassionate and pragmatic heart.